This paper combines the piecewise Cubic Hermite (CH) interpolation algorithm and the weighted least square support vector machine (WLS-SVM) to improve identification accuracy for marine crafts built based on the characteristic model. The characteristic model is first used to describe the heading dynamics of marine crafts and is a superior model to the traditional response model in both accuracy and complexity. Especially in order to improve identification accuracy, a CH-based data preprocessing strategy is utilized to densify and smooth data for further accurate identification. Subsequently, the combination of the linear kernel function and the Gaussian kernel function is introduced in the conventional WLS-SVM method, which renders global and local performance improvements compared with the conventional WLS-SVM method. Finally, informative maneuvers composed of Zigzag and Sine are carried out to test the performance of the improved identification method. Compared to the conventional LS-SVM method based on the response model, the root mean square error of the proposed CH-MK-WLS-SVM method based on the characteristic model is reduced by an order of magnitude in the presence of sensor noise.